“Oh, bother my Christmas, father!” answered Newton with a fine indifference which he did not feel.  “The Motor’s the thing!  I want to see that wheel go round for a Christmas present!”

“It will!  It shall!  It must!  I promise you that!” The man was almost beside himself with joy.

No misgiving disturbed him.  He had the faith that tosses mountains aside like pebbles, now that the means were in his hand.  He had the little fulcrum for his lever, which was all Archimedes required to move the world.  He had in him the certainty of being right that has sent millions of men to glory or destruction.

That day was one of the happiest in all his life, either before or, afterwards.  He could have believed that he had fallen asleep at the moment when he had quite broken down, and that a hundred years of change had glided by, like a watch in the night, when he opened his wife’s letter and wakened in a blaze of joy and hope and glorious activity.  Nothing he could remember of that kind could compare with his pride and honourable satisfaction when he walked into the bank two hours afterwards, with his head high, and said he should be glad to take up the note he had signed yesterday and have the balance of the cheque placed to his credit; and few surprises which the partner who had obliged him could recollect, had equalled that worthy gentleman’s amazement when the debt was paid so soon.

“If you had only told me that you would be in funds so soon, Mr. Overholt,” he said, “I should not have thought of troubling you.  Here is your note.  Will you kindly look at it and tear it up?”

“I did not know,” answered Overholt, doing as he was told.

It is a curious fact that the little note lay in a locked drawer of the partner’s magnificent table, instead of being put away in the safe with other and larger notes, where it belonged.  It may seem still stranger that, on the books, Overholt’s account showed that it had been balanced by a deposit exactly equal to the deficit, made by the partner himself, instead of by crediting the amount of the note.  But Overholt never knew this, for a pass-book had always been a mystery to him, and made his head ache.  The banker had thought of his face some time after he had gone out with his battered umbrella and his shabby shoulders rounded as under a burden, and somehow the Christmas spirit must have come in quietly and touched the rich man too, though even the stenographer did not see what happened.  For he had once been in terrible straits himself, a quarter of a century ago, and some one had helped him just in time, and he knew what it meant to slink out of a big bank, in shabby clothes, his back bowed under the heavy weight of debt and failure.

Overholt never knew; but he expressed his warm thanks for what now seemed a small favour, and with his wooden model of the casting, done up in brown paper, under his arm, he went off to the foundry in Long Island.